Can you talk more about the 1992 election itself? I think people now understand it as Bush losing the popularity he earned after his great success with the Gulf War because the economy tanked. And then you have this quirky Ross Perot figure. But why do you think it was so important?
That election, I believe, demonstrated a crisis in American politics in which both party establishments had trouble delivering a message that could excite and rally a majority. And a lot of people turned to protest candidates. Pat Buchanan was a protest candidate within the G.O.P., and, in a way, within the conservative party.
With Ross Perot, and maybe it wouldn’t have been possible, but there were points during that election when it looked like he might actually win. His candidacy reflected a sense of a rejection of both Republicans and Democrats as being out of touch, unresponsive, and only taking care of other élites in business or in different lobbies. Perot comes along and says, “I’m going to take care of all this stuff. I’m going to march in there and handle it, and I’m going to tell both these corrupt parties what’s up, and tell corrupt Congress what’s up.” Drain the swamp, essentially. He was the Caesarist solution that many people now see in Trump, and part of Trump’s playing around with the idea of a Presidential run was in Perot’s Reform Party. He saw a lane for himself which Perot was carving out.
Perot is a businessman who touts his competence in business as a way to clean up the government. And he says, “I’m rich and we’re going to make the country rich and successful again.” He’s a very interesting creature because he’s not clearly left or right. I think that he’s much more conservative or even reactionary than not, but the way he was perceived was as an alternative to both left and right and a solution for a system that had failed. Neither the left nor the right had a viable answer to the country’s issues.